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Bellevue Art Musuem Review

Vaughn artist Tip Toland finds truth in sculptingVaughn sculptor Tip Toland creates eerily life-like figures in clay. Her first solo museum exhibition is coming up at the Bellevue Arts Museum. ROSEMARY PONNEKANTI; rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com
Published: September 15th, 2008 12:30 AM | Updated: September 15th, 2008 12:46 PM
In Tip Toland’s studio, there’s an old lady curled up on the floor, a shivering girl and a little boy with his hands down his pants. Which is all exactly as it should be.
Toland is a sculptor, whose clay figures utilize synthetic hair and wax lips in their extraordinarily lifelike appearance.

It’s long, hard work, but the result is art that has won her recognition, such as a 2007 Neddy Award nomination and representation by top Seattle and New York galleries. Now her first solo museum show is coming up this month at the Bellevue Arts Museum, and she’s busy finishing torsos and faces.

“Right after my first ceramics class in art school, I jumped straight from a fine-arts to a ceramics major,” says Toland, sitting in her garage studio in Vaughn. Though she fell in love with clay, it took her a while to sculpt seriously with it: first drawing in it, then doing shallow relief work, large wall pieces with human figures on highly surreal backgrounds.

Finally, after receiving a grant 10 years ago, Toland took the plunge into full sculpture. The result wasn’t pretty: “Short, chunky figures,” says Toland. “They’re just awful.”

Realizing she needed training, Toland took classes at Seattle’s Gage Academy, read all the anatomy books she could find, and – most importantly – began using live models. In 2002 she started working on life-size sculptures, and her talent for recreating the human form in all its blunt detail emerged.

“She puts an incredible amount of work into her pieces, and achieves an incredible likeness,” says Stefano Catalani, curator for the Bellevue show.

In her work exhibited at Tacoma Art Museum last year for the Neddy Awards, Toland’s two self-portraits as a baby and an old woman, both putting on bright red lipstick, are intense in their realism. The old woman’s face is deeply lined, her hair stringy, eyes bright in that way vigilant old ladies have.

The old woman in the studio – a different one from the TAM sculpture, from a different model, and part of the six-piece Bellevue show – lies naked, the folds of her gaunt belly carved like Baroque drapery. The young girl, shivering in a yellow swimsuit, hunches her shoulders as only cold swimmers can, and the little boy with both hands in his pants has that blankly innocent expression that goes with the action. A stout man plays a toy violin with a sadly resigned gesture.

As Catalani says, people probably will pass through Toland’s show and think some of these sculptures are real. Yet with some of the figures nearly seven feet high, such realism takes a lot of work.

After finding a live model – selected for interesting body form, such as age or a rotund belly – Toland begins to draw. She then builds an armature out of plumber’s pipe, arranged in the physical gesture she’s aiming at. The pipe skeleton is then packed with clay into a solid sculpture. When leather-dry, the sculpture gets broken into pieces (around five per leg, for instance) in order to remove the pipe and hollow out the clay with tools. After scoring, Toland reassembles the figure, fires it in parts (usually only a torso will fit into the kiln), fixes it together, sands and pains, with the hair and lips coming last.

Her most recent work, which is also part of the Bellevue show, a woman on a swing with head flung back, is actually motorized (it will swing slowly in the gallery) and so takes even more work to create. The Bellevue show, Toland estimates, has occupied two years of her life, interspersed with her teaching jobs at Seattle art schools.